ion of original
materials on so grand a scale. It was necessary, therefore, to select
and make use of the best authorities, critical and historical, those
whose researches have been most valuable and comprehensive, in each
particular department of the field. These authorities were to be found,
not in a single language, but in several; and even after they were
found, and the various results of their investigations put at their just
estimate, the important work of selection had then only just
commenced. Here were the master-critics and antiquaries,--the Muellers,
Champollions, and all. Some use must be made of each; but the compass,
no less than the design, of the work demanded the exclusion of all
secondary and unimportant matter, yet in such a manner that the ideal
unity should not be at all disturbed. Here was required, not merely tact
and discrimination, but a high degree of philosophical analysis; and
since this was valueless except as it was followed by comprehensive
synthesis, the power of artistic combination was no less requisite to
the complete result.

From the foregoing remarks it must not be supposed that there has been
throughout a remodelling of all the material used. On the contrary,
it is one of the most important of the features which give value and
interest to the work, that in frequent instances the material has been
presented precisely as it came to hand; a felicitous or humorous turn
of a sentence, a pointed antithesis, a happy grouping of historic
incidents, or a vigorous clinching of manifold thoughts in a single
expression, has been happily preserved where by others it might have
been ejected, or marred in the changing, for the sake of giving to the
work a factitious claim to an originality which, in such a field, is
plainly the least desirable characteristic. Our most hearty thanks are
due to Mrs. Botta that she has been willing to sacrifice what at the
best would have been a spurious claim to the purely legitimate one,
of having conquered almost insuperable difficulties, and, by the most
conscientious fidelity, elaborated a really valuable treatise, where
before there existed none at all.

So great as has been the need of this work, so great will be the
appreciation of it at the hands of the reading public. A whole has been
given where hitherto only parts had existed, and those for the most part
inaccessible to the general reader.

We have no space to enlarge upon the many particular excellen